Katherine Jean
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Research Mentor(s): Emily Laub
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology / LSA
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Katherine Jean, Emily Laub, Elizabeth Tibbetts
Presenter: 50
Abstract
Forming social groups has important implications for how groups cooperate, and the personality of individual animals potentially contributes to their group-forming behaviors. Paper wasps present an interesting model to study group interactions, as the species spends a large amount of their short life-spans shopping for nests and social partners. We conducted a study to investigate the influence of personality on how animals form social groups and to explore the potential relationship between the personality traits of individual wasps and their shopping behavior- the sampling of partners and nests prior to social group formation. We evaluated four personality traits in the wasps (activity, exploration, aggression, and affiliation) using two different personality assays and recorded four trials for each assay. We totaled each wasp’s active time and the number of maze chambers it entered in a 10 minute period to determine exploration and activity, and affiliation and aggression were categorized by each interaction a wasp had with a dummy wasp and which of several identifiable behaviors it matched, totaling the time spent doing each behavior. After conducting personality trials, we released the wasps into a large outdoor enclosure and took daily censuses to evaluate the number of social partners and nests they sampled before stable social groups were formed. Wasp social personality and exploratory personality were compared to the number of nest sites and partners each sampled throughout the summer. We predict that wasps with greater exploratory and affiliative personalities will sample more partners and nests prior to forming groups. This study provides insight into the role personality plays in social partner assessment.
Interdisciplinary, Natural/Life Sciences
